Colored pyrotechnics

Regular submitter [Jared Bouck] from Inventgeek.com has sent us this cool project. He wanted to make a fireball cannon, but didn’t want to settle for plain old fireballs.Instead of using a common propane system, he built an alcohol based one so he had a “blank slate” to start with. He then applied some copper chloride to get the desired greens and blues. With all of the fire displays we see, how come we don’t see more colored flames? Check out the overview video after the break.

omg, no way! this is soooo awesome! have the professionals figured out how to do this yet? i have never seen this before, ever. i didn’t even think this was possible! unless he’s a witch…
/ Burn him!
// with his own magical colored flames!

I mean its not that expensive if ya want you can just use things like copper – green, magnesium – white, iron – red, cobalt – blue… its not that difficult to make filaments of these metals, nor to find them… I mean if you are doing pyrotechnics im sure that you could get the stuff from a chemical supply store or online…

It’s not that simple…. Yes the coloring agents are expensive because they have to be capable of dissolving in alcohol. Alcohol its self will burn blue and yellow. This is from the sodium present in almost anything around us. To burn clear and clean you need methyl alcohol. There are only a few things you can dissolve in this that will produce color. Like the lithium chloride and copper chloride. It’s also worth pointing out that the amount of copper chloride he used in his shot would cost about .35 per each 2oz shot. So expensive is relative…

We’ve used a copper pipe pinched closed at one end with holes drilled in it. Plop that in a camp fire with the open end out in the cooler air and you’ll get green flames. its reusable too. The effect isn’t as dramatic as this, but its enough to amuse people at a camp out.

could the chemicals not be injected into the flame in powder form rather than trying to mix it into the alcohol? that way you can switch colours at will… (This may have already been answered in the video’s, but i’m in work and can’t watch them)

I remember our AAS machine in the lab being able to produce a dramatic color change in the flame while only pulling a tiny bit of *very* dilute aqueous solution. half the machine is just a glorified spray nozzle that feeds into an acetylene/no2 or acetylene/air flame. more heat and smaller mist particles = more ionization.

i’m not sure about scaling such a thing up, but don’t think it would be unreasonable to rig a blast of acetylene and aqueous mist in front of that torch.

They mix a solution of methanol and coloring agents (lithium, copper chloride, etc) in a large (10+ gallon it seemed) container, and pushed it through the line with pressurized nitrogen, resulting in a 50-foot-high colored flame.

The pros have been aware of this for a long time, but have a hard time doing anything with liquid fuels; fire marshalls don’t allow it, NFPA code doesn’t allow it, and experience dictates a healthy fear of liquid fuel. Vapor is much safer, but more difficult to color. Also the expense lies not in the coloring agents but in the hardware required to handle methanol; stainless steel costs maybe 10x as much. Methanol eats aluminum, coloring salts corrode steel. It’s more challenging than it looks.